Showcasing the artwork and process of Roleplaying and Fantasy Literature Illustrator Del Teigeler

Friday, September 11, 2015

& Magazine Character Studies...

Here are a few more pieces for & Magazine, a quarterly 1st Edition Suppliment. This particular issue covers Inns, Taverns, and Waystations. I submitted several pieces for the article titled Friend or Foe: The Tinkerer's.

All of the NPC's detailed are couples that travel together, and +Bryan Fazekas the editor/writer of the article and I decided that portraits of the couples would work pretty well.

It just so happens that I have been working on life studies and portraits as part of my ongoing personal improvement plan as an artist, so it fit right in. Each of the portraits were composed separately and then merged digitally with GIMP.

I really tried to not overwork them, in pencil and do them as quickly as possible. Turns out there were parts that gave me fits. Read on for my honest assessment of the artwork.

This first one is of Kaukenen a male cleric and his spouse Joey, a magic-user.

Copyright Del Teigeler 2015.

As it turns out I drew Joey early on, and completed Kaukenen as the last of the eight portraits. Looking firstly at Joey, the description called for a homely woman with intelligent eyes. There are several aspects to her portrait that I am fond of and several that I could have done better on.

Firstly, I am not an expert at drawing hair, however, I have been practicing and watching a ton of instructional videos, and I am quite pleased with her braiding. The dark and lights really sell the wrap around style of the braid, and the wisps of hair coming along the sides of her face, I feel really framed her, perhaps her left (right to the viewer) "wisp" could have fallen more naturally.

Now for the not so goods, first I need to work on eyes. That is the plan for my next self evaluation. I have a firm grasp on creature eyes but human eyes are another beast all-together (excuse the pun). Secondly, I am planning on working on facial composition. What I mean by that is the shape and curve of her jaw, and cheeks seems off to me, granted she is not supposed to be beautiful by any stretch, but there is something that I did not capture as well as I had hoped. There are a ton of rules to follow when building a face, and I think I need to re-look at those rules.

As for the male; he was the last portrait I completed in this series, and I feel I did the best job on him than any of them. First, the extreme right facing angle of him is unique, and gives the viewer a good profile image. He was written as ruggedly handsome and a "catch" for the ladies. The best feature is the hair, surprisingly. Perhaps I have gotten the hang of it after all of the study.

His worst feature in my opinion is once again his eyes, though I did a better job of creating a believable expression, there is something not right about his right eye (left to the viewer). I worked and worked it, but it didn't get better.

Once I digitally combined the two, I feel I could have composed them better, to fit together. He seems to be staring off through her head, and it would have been better compositionally if I would have faced her at the extreme angle that I had positioned him, but it works overall I suppose. Drawing them together could have probably solved the problem, but I wanted to draw each portrait large, so that I could work each at a larger scale for detail sake.

Well, that seems like a lot of reading, so I will leave it at that and save the other drawings for another post perhaps in a day or two.